Polo

23

Ricky got very uptight at Miami Airport when his polo sticks were nearly put on a plane to Hawaii by mistake.

‘Expect the poor things needed a holiday. You work them hard enough,’ said Perdita. But even Ricky telling her not to be bloody silly couldn’t douse her sudden euphoria at the sight of the BA stickers being stamped on their luggage. She was going to Argentina, home of the greatest polo players and ponies in the world.

The Buenos Aires flight was delayed and the plane horribly hot, but this didn’t upset the passengers who seemed delighted to be going home. The men, very handsome and as many of them blond as dark, gathered at the back of the plane, embracing each other and eyeing Perdita with approval and chattering like a great drinks party. After a shamingly large second supper of chicken, sweetcorn and cake, a vast vodka and tonic and half a bottle of red wine, at one o’clock in the morning the chatter suddenly turned into the Frogsmore Stream running under Snow Cottage and she fell asleep until six to find the chatter going on as loud as ever.

Women passengers who’d nodded off in full make-up emerged with faces crumpled and ankles swollen. For breakfast they were offered cake again, this time with salt and pepper.

‘Bearing in mind the vast divide between rich and poor in Argentina, they presumably let them eat cake all the time,’ said Perdita.

Ricky didn’t smile. He’d had another sleepless night and ahead lay customs, who couldn’t be expected to be exactly pro-British, and because of post and telephone strikes in Argentina, he hadn’t been able to confirm the flight with Alejandro, so they’d have to go through the hassle of hiring a car to drive the 330 kilometres out to his estancia.

Perdita, however, was excitedly looking down on vast faded pink rivers curling through spinach-green forest, and the blue shadow of their plane lying across Buenos Aires. Now she could see red houses, swimming-pools, race tracks, skyscrapers sticking up like teeth, and roads and railways so uniformly crisscross they seemed like tiles on a vast kitchen floor.

Rupert had also pulled some powerful strings. After a lightning whip through immigration, an official located all their luggage and polo sticks and whizzed them through customs. As they came through the exit doors, Ricky looked wearily round for an Avis sign. Perdita, in a faded purple T-shirt and sawn-off pale pink jeans, was pleasantly aware of all the men staring unashamedly at her. Then a young man in a blue shirt rushed up to his arriving girlfriend with a huge bunch of hyacinths and daffodils. Abandoning the English winter, Perdita realized she and Ricky had gone slap into the Argentine spring.

Next minute a tall, blond boy with a bull-dog jaw and massive shoulders walked up to them, looking slightly apprehensive.

‘Hi, Ricky,’ he said in a deep Florida drawl. ‘Don’t know if you remember me, Luke Alderton. If you want to hit me across the airport, I’ll understand, OK, but I’m staying with Alejandro. Thought you might like a ride out to the estancia.’

For a second, Ricky glared at him, then he smiled. ‘I never had any fight with you, Luke. It’s incredibly kind of you to meet us on the offchance. This is Perdita.’

Perdita found her hand being engulfed in an incredibly strong grip, and Luke looked down at her, grinning lazily and appreciatively.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Ricky.

‘Being used as cheap labour to break Alejandro’s ponies,’ said Luke, taking Perdita’s suitcases from her, ‘in return for picking up a few tips from the master.’ (He pronounced it masster.)

‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Ricky. ‘You can look after Perdita.’

‘Shouldn’t be too much of a hardship,’ said Luke, then eyeing Perdita’s slender arms, ‘but she better start pumping iron if she’s going to play high goal.’

As he sorted out the porter with amazingly fluent Spanish, Perdita noticed he was wearing a bomber jacket with US Open printed on the back.

‘Who’s he?’ she whispered to Ricky.

‘Bart’s son by a previous marriage,’ said Ricky. ‘Potentially the best back in the world.’

Within seconds they’d piled into a battered Mercedes and were fighting their way out on to the airport road. Luke pointed to a red spotted scarf gathering dust up on the dashboard.

‘You may want to put that over your eyes, the driving’s kinda crazy here,’ he said as ten cars hurtled forward with absolutely no lane discipline, and all went straight through a red light with furious honking. Next moment a huge bus with Jumbo El Rapido on the side tore past overtaking and cutting in front.

‘Christ,’ muttered Perdita.

‘Good training for the polo here,’ said Luke. ‘The Carlisle twins and my brother Red were down here last week with Victor Kaputnik. They came out of a restaurant and had a race with Juan O’Brien and two of his cousins. Victor nearly had a triple by-pass. He jumped out of Red’s car yelling, “Taxi, taxi”. He was so frightened he wouldn’t let the driver go across a green light in case he hit Red and the twins coming the other way.’ Luke shook with laughter.

‘Who’s staying with Alejandro?’ asked Ricky.

‘Well, one guy couldn’t stand the pace and Ray Walter broke his wrist and went home, and there’s an Argie, Angel Solis de Gonzales, ex-Mirage pilot, trying to make it as a pro. Not wildly pro-Brit understandably.’

‘Any good?’ asked Ricky.

‘Awesome. He’s only been playing seriously for a couple of years,’ said Luke, hardly flinching as a car cut right in front of him, missing them by millimetres. Leaning out of the window, he let loose a stream of abuse.

‘How come you speak such good Spanish?’ asked Perdita.

‘Last time I was here it rained for forty days. The only answer was to learn Spanish. They say my accent is ’orrible, but at least I can understand what they’re saying on the pitch and suss out their Machiavellian little games.’

They were into flat, open country now. Perdita looked at the huge puddles reflecting a vast expanse of sky.

‘I’m really, really here.’

Luke smiled. ‘You will fall madly in love with Argentina,’ he said in his deep husky voice, which had a slight break in it, ‘with the wild life, the birds, the open spaces. But you will find it unconquerable, the extremes, the ferocity, the apparent heartlessness, the hailstorms that can wipe out a crop in half an hour. People own masses of land, not developing it or working it. It’s just there.’

‘How very un-American,’ said Perdita.

Looking sideways at Luke, she decided that he wasn’t at all good-looking but definitely attractive. A tawny giant with shoulders and arms like a blacksmith’s, he had lean hips, more freckles than a gull’s egg, a snub nose, sleepy honey-coloured eyes, Bart’s pugnacious jaw and red-gold hair sticking up like a Dandy brush. He was also attractive because he was so reassuring.

On top of the dashboard was a poem called Martin Fierro and a Spanish dictionary lying with its spine up, to which he must have been referring as he waited.

‘It’s the great Gaucho poem,’ he told her. ‘Martin Fierro’s aim in life was to sleep on a bed of clover, look up at the stars, and live as free as a bird in the sky. He put his horse and his dog a long way before his wife.’

‘You don’t look as though you read poetry,’ said Perdita in amazement, ‘and Martin’s a very naff name for a Gaucho.’

Ricky, sharing the back with two polo helmets, a new saddle and numerous carrier bags of shopping, was beginning to relax.

‘How’s Alejandro?’

‘Probably had ten more kids since you were last here. Argentines adore their kids,’ Luke told Perdita. ‘Their big interest is the family. They won’t pay taxes, and they never stop at red lights.’ He put out a huge hand to shield Perdita as a car shot out.

‘Who are you playing for next year?’ asked Ricky.

‘Hal Peters – the automobile king – nice guy,’ said Luke. ‘Thought about nothing but cars for the first twenty-five years of his life, now he thinks about nothing but polo. He’s given me a free hand to buy horses. But every time I show any interest Alejandro quadruples the price. I guess I’m lucky to be working. Young American players are really feeling the cold at the moment. They can’t get sponsorship, because all the patrons think it’s chic to have an Argie on their side.’

‘Your father has three,’ said Ricky bleakly. ‘What’s Red’s handicap now?’

‘Six, should be higher. He hates to stick and ball. His mother allowed him to sit out college for a year and he never went back. He won MVP awards – Most Valuable Player,’ he explained to Perdita, ‘all summer, then blows it by testing positive for drugs the day before the US Open. Gets suspended and fined $5,000.’

‘Is he coming down here?’

‘Well, he’s always expected, like the Messiah,’ Luke grinned at Perdita. ‘My kid brother’s kind of wild. Like Richard Cory he glitters and flutters pulses as he walks. Look, heron on the edge of that alfalfa field.’

With the amazing eyesight that had helped him become a great player, Luke pointed out egrets, storks and even a snake that whisked into its hole before Perdita could see it.

Passing through a town, Perdita noticed someone had painted a blue-and-white flag and a ‘Malvinas belong to Argentina’ slogan on the plinth of a statue of a general.

‘For Christ’s sake, keep your trap shut about the Falklands when we get there,’ said Ricky.

‘Alejandro’s not anti-Brit,’ said Luke. ‘He likes anyone he can sell horses to. He still talks mistily about Cowdray, and Guards and the parties, and the hospitality, and the women you didn’t have to date twenty-two times before laying them.’

They were deep in the country now, driving through absolutely flat land like a table top. Slowly Perdita was trying to absorb the immensity of the pampas. The vast unclouded duck-egg-blue semi-circle of sky, like a protractor on the horizon, was only broken by the occasional windmill or fringe of acid-yellow poplars or milk-green gum trees. The grass seemed to flow on for ever like a millpond sea. Occasionally, like a liner, they passed an estancia with stables and a drive flanked by poplars and sailed on. At last Luke swung on to a dirt road potted with huge holes. His left elbow, sticking out of the window, was soon spattered with mud as they shattered vast puddles reflecting the blue of the sky.

‘Sorry,’ he said as Perdita nearly hit the ceiling. ‘You should have taken a sleeping pill.’

On the right was a sunlit village with square white houses like a Western shanty town.

‘This place is called General Piran after some top brass who defended his country against the marauding British. It’s the nearest civilization to Alejandro’s place,’ explained Luke. ‘That’s the phone exchange which never works. That’s the fire station. They’ve got two fire stations, but all the houses are so far away they never get there in time. The teachers are all on strike, hardly surprising when they’re only paid a hundred dollars a month, so all Alejandro’s kids are at home getting under their mother’s feet.’

He is nice, thought Perdita. How did anyone as vile as Bart produce a son like that?

‘Alejandro’s land begins here at the water.’ He pronounced it ‘wott-urr’. ‘He owns everything in front of us as far as the eye can see.’

They had swung into an avenue lined with gums, their stark, white trunks rising like pillars. At the end on the left was a stick-and-ball field, a polo field covered with gulls, paddocks full of polished horses, then a group of red modern buildings. ‘Barns to the right, grooms’ quarters to the left, Alejandro’s straight ahead,’ said Luke as he drove up to a large ugly mulberry-red house with flowerbeds full of clashing red tulips, primulas and wallflowers, and a water tower completely submerged in variegated ivy.

Instantly out of the front door charged a man a foot smaller than Luke, but with a barrel-chest as big. He had a huge Beethoven head of black curls, a brown face scorched with wrinkles by an unrelenting sun, small dark eyes and a smile like a slice of water melon, which showed a lot of gold fillings. He wore old jeans, espadrilles and a torn blue T-shirt through which spilled a lot of black chest-hair. Throwing open his arms, he gave a great roar of laughter.

‘El Orgulloso,’ he shouted, ‘El Orgulloso. Mountain Everest, he come to Mahomet at last,’ and he folded Ricky in a vast hot embrace. ‘Welcome, we are so please to see you.’

Then, peering round the side of Ricky’s arm, he caught sight of Perdita and his little black eyes brightened even more.

‘And this is Perdita. She is certainly very OK.’ Seizing her hand, he looked her up and down. ‘Why you waste your life on polo? Find a nice billionaire instead.’

‘I want both,’ said Perdita.

Alejandro gave another bellow of laughter.

‘Good girl, good girl. I speak very well English, don’t you theenk? Come and see my ponies.’ About to lead them back towards the stables, he lowered his voice and said to Luke, ‘Did you get it?’

Luke nodded and, getting a red jewel box out of his jeans’ pocket, handed it to Alejandro just before a beautiful woman came out of the house. She had heavy lids above huge, dark, mournful eyes, a wonderful sculptured, aquiline nose, a big, sad, red mouth and long, shiny, blond hair with dark roots showing down the middle parting. She also had a wonderful bosom, a thickening waist and very slim brown legs in leather sandals.

‘Reeky,’ she hugged him. ‘It has been so long, and this must be Perdita.’ A shadow of apprehension crossed her face, immediately replaced by a warm and welcoming smile. ‘What a beauty,’ she said, kissing Perdita on both cheeks. ‘I am Claudia, Alejandro’s wife. Let me show you your room. You must be tired.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Alejandro.

‘She ’as come ’alfway across the world,’ protested Claudia.

‘To see my horses,’ said Alejandro.

They went across a lawn down an avenue of mulberry trees, past a thickly planted orange grove.

‘To ’ide the chickens,’ explained Alejandro.

To the right, a lot of youths building a swimming-pool eyed Perdita with interest. Alejandro snapped at them to get on with their work. The stables were far more primitive than Perdita expected. A few words in Spanish had been painted on the tack-room roof.

‘It says, “Please don’t tether any horses to this roof, or they’ll pull it off’,’ translated Luke.

Dancer’s latest hit single, ‘Girl Guide’, was belting out of the tack room. A pack of emaciated lurchers with burrs in their rough dusty coats charged forward, whimpering and weaving against Perdita’s legs. But as she bent to cuddle them a small boy, brushing down a pony, picked up a lump of mud and hurled it at the dogs to drive them off. Perdita was about to yell at him when her attention was distracted by a man with a cruel leathery face wearing gaucho pants and a white shirt who was galloping a pony very fast round a tiny corral. The horse’s nostrils were vastly inflated and it was panting rhythmically as its hooves struck the hard ground. The man’s control was undeniable. She could hear the horse groan as he squeezed it with his calves.

‘That’s Raimundo the peticero, master of the horse,’ said Luke, with a slight edge to his voice.

‘Looks a nasty piece of work.’

‘Work isn’t the operative word. He’s acting busy because Alejandro’s here.’

In the yard an old man in a beret was clipping a pony’s mane. The pony was rolling its eyes but stood motionless because a young boy relentlessly twisted its ear. Other horses wandered loose among the gum trees, while still others were muzzled and tied up. They looked very thin, but well-muscled.

‘They’re playing this afternoon,’ explained Luke. ‘Argentines don’t feed or water their horses eight hours before a match. I guess they are thin, but again Argentines don’t like their horses to carry a lot of weight.’

Perdita grew increasingly boot-faced when every pony she tried to cuddle cringed away with terror.

‘They’re all headshy,’ she complained furiously.

‘Shut up,’ said Luke. ‘You’re here to learn not beef.’

Fortunately Alejandro was concentrating on Ricky, boasting that every pony in the yard had been entirely responsible for clinching last year’s Argentine Open. They were distracted by a boy in his twenties cantering into the yard on a beautiful red chestnut. He had a bony, tortured face, angry, slanting peacock-blue eyes, bronze curls and a sallow complexion.

Wow! thought Perdita.

‘Angel,’ yelled Alejandro, ‘breeng that mare ’ere. I want Reeky to see ’er.’ Then with a touch of malice, ‘These are my friends, Reeky and Perdeeta. Isn’t she beautiful? Won’t she need the charity belt?’

Angel pulled up in horror and a cloud of dust, growled something incomprehensible, but undeniably insulting, threw down the reins, kicked his right foot out of the stirrup and, swinging it over the horse’s withers, jumped to the ground and ran into the house.

‘Zat is Angel,’ said Alejandro with a shrug, ‘still fighting zee Falklands War.’

Amazing cooking smells were drifting from the kitchen. Seeing Perdita beginning to wilt, Luke took her back to the house.

Ricky and Alejandro had to be dragged away from the horses to a lunch laid out on a blue-and-white checked tablecloth under the gum trees. They needed two tables to accommodate the ten children.

Ranging from twenty-one downwards, there were three boys, Patricio Maria, Luis Maria and Lorenzo Maria, followed by three ravishing plump girls, followed by four more boys, the youngest being little Pablo, who was three. All had the dark eyes and dark curls of their father.

Claudia exclaimed in delight over the presents Ricky had brought, which included a dark red cashmere jersey, a length of Harris Tweed, a striped silk Turnbull and Asser dressing gown and a Herbert Johnson tweed cap for Alejandro. Then she introduced her children to Perdita.

‘Don’t warry,’ said Alejandro with his great laugh. ‘I don’t recognize them myself sometime.’

‘Only the ones that play polo,’ said Claudia without rancour.

‘Have a wheesky, Ricky,’ said Alejandro, brandishing Ricky’s duty-free Bourbon. Then, when Ricky shook his head, ‘But you used to dreenk half a bottle before chukkas. It was your petrol.’

‘I’ve changed.’

‘Luke?’ asked Alejandro.

‘Not if I’ve gotta play this afternoon,’ said Luke, sitting down next to Perdita.

‘You are, because I’m not,’ said Alejandro, splashing whisky into his glass. ‘The opposition’s very weak today,’ he explained to Ricky, ‘but Luke is a good back. I must look after my laurel.’

Two silent maids served them. Perdita felt too tired to eat, but when she tried her steak it was pure poetry, tender as velvet, juicy as an orange, and so exploding with flavour that she was soon piling her plate with potato purée, tomato salad and geranium-red barbecue sauce.

‘I can’t believe this food,’ she said to Claudia five minutes later. ‘It’s wonderful.’

‘We in Argentina are very like the Breetish except in their cooking, which is ’orrible,’ said Alejandro, who was now wearing both his new dressing gown and the tweed cap over his black gollywog curls. ‘I like to dress like an Englishman.’

The talk was all of polo. Claudia didn’t contribute and concentrated on the younger children.

‘I love to play again in England,’ Alejandro said to Ricky. ‘When you theenk the ban will be lifted?’

‘I don’t know,’ sighed Ricky, who was eating hardly anything. ‘Prince Charles is Colonel of the Welsh Guards, which makes it very difficult for him. And there’s the security problem.’

‘That is a point,’ said Alejandro, looking round. ‘Where’s Angel?’

‘Not ’ungry,’ said Claudia, trying to force potato purée into little Paolo.

‘Not ’ungry, angry. Angel,’ he explained to Ricky, ‘was an ex-Mirage pilot. He ’ate the English, but when he gets to know Perdita,’ Alejandro smiled at her from under the peak of his cap, ‘he will forgeeve.’

Perdita, having taken far too much, was now feeding the rest of the steak to the shaggy lurchers who ringed the table, but kept their distance.

‘They’re so thin,’ she protested to Alejandro.

‘Raimundo don’t feed them. They live on hares and badgers they catch out in the pampas.’

Perdita didn’t think she could eat another thing, but the figs in syrup that followed were so delicious she was soon piling on great dollops of cream.

‘Angel is stupid,’ went on Alejandro. ‘The rest of us in Argentina ’ave forgiven you for the Falklands War.’

‘Oh good,’ said Perdita, brightening up. ‘Why is that?’

‘Because of Benny Hill,’ said Alejandro. ‘We love heem, and all those lovely girls with no clothes on. I love Eenglish programmes, Upper Stairs, Down Stairs. The only thing I watch else is polo on cable, and we’ve got a veedeo of last year’s Open. I’ll show it to you, Reeky.’

‘And you can point out all the ponies you’ve just showed me who allegedly played in it,’ said Ricky drily.

Alejandro giggled. ‘Some was previous year.’

‘Our doctor has tiny plane that was conscripted during the Malvinas War,’ said Claudia. ‘The military say they want to fly rockets on it, but when they see ’ow small it was, it didn’t get called up.’

‘All the food parcels people sent us from abroad was stolen by the post office,’ said Alejandro.

What heavenly people, thought Perdita. They’re so merry and funny.

The spear-shaped leaves of the gum tree were dappling their faces as the sun moved towards the Andes. A dragonfly was bombing the table. Luke pointed out a stork, black and white between the silver trunks. Beyond, the pampas seemed to swim in the midday heat.

‘Ow long are you weeth us, Reeky?’ asked Claudia, who’d had a secret crush on him in the old days and was appalled to see how grey and tense he looked.

‘Probably the day after tomorrow.’

‘But you said you’d stay a week,’ said Perdita in horror.

‘Where are you going next?’ asked Luke.

‘Palm Springs.’

‘That’s great,’ said Luke. ‘My half-sister Bibi’s out there. Working in LA. You must call her. She doesn’t get out enough. She’s on a zero handicap, but she’d play super if she played more.’

‘Who’s your patron now, Reeky?’ asked Alejandro.

‘Dancer Maitland,’ chipped in Perdita proudly.

Alejandro nearly fell off his seat. All the Mendoza children were roused out of their pallid apathy.

‘You get his autograph?’

‘You send us records?’

‘He numero uno this week.’

‘Is he nice? Please breeng ’im ’ere.’

‘He’s a sweet man,’ admitted Ricky. ‘But he’s very busy, and has difficulty even finding time to stick and ball. You stupid bitch,’ he murmured furiously under his breath to Perdita, ‘now Alejandro’ll quadruple his prices.’

‘Please stay, Reeky,’ pleaded Claudia. ‘You need a holiday. Let us pamper you.’

‘Let them pampas you,’ said Perdita bitterly.

She loves him, thought Luke. Perdita was very pale now, her skin the parchment colour of her white-blond mane. She’ll be like a little palomino when she turns brown, he thought.

‘Have a siesta,’ Claudia urged her as they’d finished coffee.

‘No, I want to look at the ponies with Ricky,’ said Perdita, frantic not to miss a minute.

‘Just for an hour. We all do,’ said Claudia soothingly.

Upstairs, feeling utterly suicidal, Perdita looked round her tiny bare room. The only furniture was a wardrobe, a chest of drawers with no lining paper, a straight-backed wooden chair and a narrow single bed with a carved headboard. There was an overhead light with no lampshade and a bedside lamp on the floor which didn’t work. The only colour came from a picture of a gaucho cracking a whip, a tiny red mat and a shocking pink counterpane. She ought to unpack, but she only got as far as getting out Ricky’s photograph in its blue silk frame and putting it beside the bed. The thought of all those blonde movie stars in Palm Springs pursuing him made her feel quite sick. She’d gone off Luke since he suggested Ricky ring his sister.

She’d just lie on the bed for a minute. Did she imagine it or did a head of bronze curls pop round the door, and were a pair of peacock-blue eyes gazing at her with implacable hatred? Then the door slammed shut and next moment she was asleep.